About Jacques Villeglé

Claiming, “The whole world makes work for me—I only have to collect it,” Jacques Villeglé has kept his keen eye on the walls of Paris since 1949, gathering torn advertising posters and collaging them together into striking compositions on canvas, full of humor, eroticism, and social and political criticism. A member of the Nouveau Réalisme group, whose founding manifesto he signed in 1960, Villeglé creates art out of parts of the world. His early works were darkly colored and tended towards abstraction, punctuated with fragments of text. Later, displeased with the comparison of his early compositions to Cubist paintings, he moved towards brighter colors and began using more imagery, which has become increasingly sexual. Believing in art’s power to expose uncomfortable realities, Villeglé re-mixes the messages aimed at the public to reveal and critique underlying socio-economic and propagandistic agendas.